There's nothing wrong with it as an opening. Children in particular love it and I salute Bulwer-Lytton who with this short phrase has achieved what other writers have failed to do in many volumes of published work. He lives on after his death and people are talking about him and his work to this day.
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sisyphusMar 22 '11 at 13:23

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The question asks why this is not considered a good opening. Please read this as "why is this widely considered not to be good" and refrain from offering personal opinions to the contrary. This is not a discussion forum. (If this question were asked today it would probably be put on hold for rework; now, 3.5 years later and with a bunch of extant answers, it's harder to fix.)
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Monica Cellio♦Nov 2 '14 at 2:51

7 Answers
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The author wants to get across that Really Important Things are Happening. He wants to hook you with the beginning of his book. How does he manage to impart the tremendous significance the reader should be seeing right from the start?

Answer: by giving a dramatic, atmospheric, visual. That'll be enough to give readers a striking opening, to get across that Big Stuff Is Happening.

It's a cheat, in this case, because the visual really has nothing to do with the story. It's powerful, but irrelevant - the author is invoking the visual just to draw you in, not because it fits the story or is actually significant.

And it's unsubtle because he hits you over the head with it. "It was a dark and stormy night" - that's just a hair away from writing "It was a dramatic, suspenseful night," which I think you'll agree would be absurd. The author's trying to tell you the story is significant, and doing so quite bluntly, instead of actually demonstrating its interest and significance.

Now, in moderation, those would be legitimate cheats. You can definitely get away with that kind of stuff; often it's to your advantage, as long as the reader doesn't notice outright what you've done. The difficulty is, "Dark and stormy night" is both such an egregious example, and so oft-quoted and overused, that it completely loses its effectiveness on the one hand, and calls fatal attention to its flaws on the other. It's both a cliche (because a stormy night is an effective image) and a useless one (as opposed to cliches which have true power because their core idea is so significant).

Others have responded regarding the contest. I don't think that the tiny snippet is the inspiration for the contest; the full paragraph and Bulwer-Lytton's prose in general are to blame for that.

The opening sentence is bad for a number of reasons. First, aren't all nights dark? Why say that? But it is not so bad that a good writer couldn't have recovered from it and gone on to write a good book. This author did not, however. His works are regarded by most critics as terrible. Pretty much no one but a grad student in English reads a novel like Paul Clifford today.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC) is a tongue-in-cheek contest that takes place annually and is sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Entrants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels" – that is, deliberately bad. According to the official rules, the prize for winning the contest is "a pittance",1 or $250.[2]

The contest was started in 1982 by Professor Scott E. Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University and is named for English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-quoted first line "It was a dark and stormy night". This opening, from the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, continues floridly:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Anything that is so universally mocked you would probably be wise to avoid, unless you are entering such a contest yourself.

I don't agree that there is anything wrong with 'a dark night'. Some nights are comparatively darker than others.
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z7sgMar 22 '11 at 12:32

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@z7sg: Well, there are still more interesting things to say about a night other than to note its darkness in an unexceptional way. The bare word shows the reader nothing. Here's an example of the word dark used well by Ayn Rand: "He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points."
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RobustoMar 22 '11 at 12:47

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Ironically, Bulwer-Lytton was a good critical reader and a friend of Charles Dickins. He was responsible for the merciful death of the original ending of Great Expectations, for instance. (Information courtesy of spending too much time at Wisbech and Fenland Museum, which has the manuscript.)
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RhodriMar 22 '11 at 13:31

Although the traditional pointer is to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's purple prose, it may be better known in Britain as a school playground story for the unimaginative which starts something like

It was a dark and stormy night and the Captain said to the Mate, "Tell us a story, Mate." So the Mate began, "It was a dark and stormy night and the Captain said to the Mate, 'Tell us a story, Mate.' So the Mate began, 'It was a dark and stormy night ...

One problem is that the sentence is heavy-handed and melodramatic. The dark is a metaphor. The storm is a metaphor. Yeah, yeah, we get it. We're in for a dark and stormy story.

Madeleine L'Engle begins A Wrinke in Time with It was a dark and stormy night. I haven't read it, but I suspect she uses the sentence playfully, deliberately tapping into its long association with heavy-handed melodrama.

+1 for mention of a good use of the opener.
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justktMar 22 '11 at 20:22

I like that novel but had completely forgotten the cliched opening. I do remember the opening scene was every bit worthy of that opening line, however. I seem to recall Terry Pratchett has used this line once or twice. Typically, he has a lot of fun with it, usually long before the end of the first page.
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staticsanMar 23 '11 at 2:00

The opening chapter of A Wrinkle in Time has events that are dependent on the weather, and it being very late (and, one can assume, dark), that set up events even further into the plot. I always thought that the line was a little silly, but the book overcomes it (and then some).
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Neil Fein♦Mar 23 '11 at 5:39

There is absolutely nothing wrong with those lines, in fact they are perfectly devised. Nobody has a problem when a movie sets the mood by opening with thunder booms and lightening flashes at night. This is just the academic elitists doing their usual 'holier than thou' schtick and similar to artsy people gushing over modern art rubbish - they think it's cool.

I have never heard anyone complain about the opening shot of any movie, on any subject. I think you are moking a knee-jerk reaction answer with no facts to support it. The early lines of any book are supposed to be designed to 'hook' the reader, whether or not the rest of the book warrants the opening is however, a legitimate debate.

Some people do complain about a movie opening with thunder and lightning to indicate "something terrible is going to happen," for exactly that reason: it's obvious to the point of being trite.
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Lauren IpsumNov 1 '14 at 14:08